Signal reception systems, for example satellite radionavigation or communication receivers, may be disturbed by interfering sources, intentional or unintentional, for example sources emitting a signal on a frequency close to that of the signal received or exhibiting harmonics around the frequency of this signal.
Consequently, the problem arises of the locating of these interfering sources so as to be able to deduce therefrom solutions making it possible to improve the processing operations allowing the removal of the undesirable effects of this interference on the receiver. In particular, the locating of interfering sources pertains to the determination of the number of sources, of their directions of arrival and of their frequency location in the useful band of the receiver.
The MUSIC algorithm, from the English “Multiple Signal Classification” known for locating emitters by detecting the emitted interference is known. This procedure is based on the determination of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the intercorrelation matrix of the signal received by the various antennas of the receiver and thus operates in the spatial domain. Its implementation is complex for processors with limited resources on account of the eigenvector decomposition of this matrix. Furthermore this procedure exhibits rather unreliable results for discriminating several interfering sources impacting the same signal.
The invention proposes an alternative procedure to those known, the complexity of implementation of which is decreased and which makes it possible to utilize an intercorrelation matrix in the spatial domain but also in the temporal domain to improve the precision of the estimations, notably when several interfering sources exist and to allow the frequency characterization of the interfering sources.